Make a Donation

Subscribe to Our Feeds

Invitation for Comments about New Web Site, New Digests/Newsletters, and Procedures

The Shakespeare Conference: SHK 22.0086 Friday, 20 May 2011

From: Hardy M. Cook <
This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it
>
Date: Friday, May 20, 2011
Subject: Invitation for Comments about New Web Site, New Digests/Newsletters, and Procedures

Dear Subscribers,

Now that we have had some time to work out the “bugs” and for us both to get accustomed to the new look and features, I think it appropriate to ask for any feedback subscribers would like to send to me as private mail.

One subscriber asked about the absence of a Table of Contents. The question is an excellent one and also one that is much more complicated than the seeming loss of a feature and the new look. Besides, I have been wondering about how folks felt about the new look and feel.

This issue involves the new platform and tools. The previous platform and procedures involved 1) My running the list from a Linux server in my home study and 2) My using L-Soft’s pioneering listserv software. With original setup, I would send each individual digest to the listserv software for distribution to list members when I completed editing it. I would make one digest for each topic and send these digests out individually. The table of contents was for separate entries within in a digest on the same topic/subject.

The problem is now I am limited to the number of mailings I can send out in a day. Before I would send five, six, seven, sometimes up to ten digests a day with some of those digests being composed of two, three, four, ten, twelve, and so on contributions to the same subject/topic. I did not understand this limitation until everything was setup. But the other features and things I can do far outweigh this one limitation.

Now, I am using apps/extensions within the Joomla Enterprise web software. With this setup, I basically send only one, or at most two digests/newsletters a day. To avoid any problems with SHAKSPER mailings being mistaken as SPAM, I now am limited to 40 mailings per 15 minutes so it takes several hours to send one digest to all the members of the list (currently 1069 members). I have, however, been concerned that the size of this one digest may to beyond the limits on size some e-mail readers impose.

I will experiment with the format; but if you go to the archives, you will see is that each entry in my daily digest/newsletter has a separate entry in the archives; so although I am sending them all out together, there are still 5, 6, 7, 10 or whatever separate entries in the archives, one for each topic. It is possible that I might append a table of contents to the one mailing, but it is going to take me sometime to figure out how to approach this procedure given the tools I am now using.

I have been wondering how people would react to the single mailing per day. However, there are so many other neat things that I can do that was not able to do before, not to mention that previously I was paying what was approaching $500 per month out of my pocket with older setup. Now, I can use formatting like italics and bold and I can embed attachments in a way that I could not before. Plus there are all sorts of other layers of security, including a masking of emails address so the list cannot be mined by unscrupulous SPAMMERs. Plus, I can have an entry for each topic/subject in the archives, and in the current postings section, and I can also put repeat the announcements in a separate listing on web site for ease of use.

I have been suing Macs for more than a year now and my Mac mouse enables me to scroll by moving my finger down the mouse itself -- very easy but another way of operating that what I used to do on the older setup.

Another issue that has been coming up is what needs to be included in the browser to go to the SHAKSPER web site. Previously, the default was www.shaksper.net , while currently the default is shaksper.net. The reason for this choice is to clarify entries in the new archives.

Yes, all of the content from the past 21 years of SHAKSPER is available on the newly re-designed site, but the URL addresses are different from what they used to be at the older site and archive. The new How to Cite page reads as follows and provides sample web addresses:

TheSHAKSPER web site is a wonderful resource for those engaged in Shakespearean research. Those wishing to cite SHAKSPER should use the following format: